Wednesday, August 01, 2007

The Pre/Postmodern Nation

Timeless, faceless, nameless, rootless. We are a people with no history, no regard for the past, no projections into the future. There is only now, lived without the tyranny of ticking seconds. We wake today with no worries and leave tomorrow for tomorrow.

We have no name with which to call ourselves and those around us. We put no labels on faces. No identifications to mark territories. We have no boundaries to set the internal and external. As such, nothing is foreign. As such, nothing is local. Instead there is a co-mingling and mutual appropriation, as that which comes from the distant encounters what is already near.

A nation of migrants, we are rootless. Not that we ever saw ourselves rooted. No centralising power has ever succeeded in locking us in, re-making us and labelling us a certain brand of human being. There is no central power that has erased our differences as we still speak in different tongues and live in different cultural spaces. Identities are negotiable, and so bodies are welcome to stay, as they are also welcome to leave. Must we fret over not being modern when the postmodern is already (t)here?